An article in today’s law.com newsletter talks of how easy it is for spammers to lift logos and contact information off a website. The Florida Bar reports that it was actually fax spam, rather than email, but the principle remains the same. Create some fake letterhead and send your bogus offers and you can tarnish someone’s good name - and it’s virtually impossible to track down the culprits, especially if they are based offshore.

On a good note, I suppose, at least the offers that were sent - for Viagra, porn, and gambling - looked like illegitimate offers. I got a message via email the other day from a spammer reporting to be Citibank. The email looked identical to something they’d send me, and a click through to their website was an exact replica. The only thing that set it apart from the original Citibank website was the domain name, which was something like www.dts.citibank.com rather than just www.citibank.com, but the site had working links to Citibank’s fraud policy and everything.

Sure, I’ve gotten similar emails in the past, most of them concerning my Paypal account, but this one was striking in that it really looked authentic - no spelling/grammar errors, “citibank” in the domain name, the text was real text rather than an image, I didn’t have to click an attached file to change my information, etc.

Maybe we don’t have to worry about fax spammers pulling identical stunts, but imagine if it had contained a somewhat enticing offer - visit our bar web site to register for such and such - and then spoofed the website to collect credit card information. You just can’t be too careful these days!

» Florida Bar Battles Bogus Faxes

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Categories: Email Marketing